President Donald Trump has struggled to stay awake as he was showered with excessive praise from Cabinet members and local officials in Tennessee.
Chairing a roundtable on public safety, the 79-year-old president could be seen repeatedly closing his eyes, occasionally jerking his head around as he appeared to drift off, while MAGA acolytes took turns giving him “Dear Leader-style” compliments.
“Before President Trump, our nation was set on a perpetual course of decline,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth told the audience, as Trump sat alongside him with his eyes closed.
“I’m living the wildest dream you could possibly imagine, sir,” added FBI director Kash Patel as Trump looked towards him with a blank stare, his eyes increasingly heavy. “It’s thanks to you.”
The event took place inside a hangar at the Memphis Air National Guard Base. After walking on stage to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, Trump kicked things off by musing about the sound system.
“Wow! This is a nice place with the best sound system,” he quipped as he sat down.
“It sounds like the finest opera hall anywhere in the world. Let’s come back here more often.”
He then revealed that the roundtable event came close to being cancelled because “we have a couple of things going on”—a reference to the war in Iran that has so far killed 13 U.S. service members and sparked a global energy crisis.
He also repeated his earlier claim that Iran now wanted “to make a deal”—something that the Iranian regime flatly rejected—before embarking on a speech about lower crime rates, border security, and Elvis Presley.
Indeed, the president was at his most animated as he announced he would visit Graceland after the meeting, telling the audience, “I love Elvis.”
“I never met Elvis,” he added. “ I met ‘em all—I met Sinatra, I met all over them—(but) I never met Elvis. Sometimes I feel I should tell a little fib and say I knew him well. I love Elvis.”
But Trump appeared to be getting sleepier as the meeting dragged on, and by the time participants were asked to take turns singing his praises, he started to look as though he were drifting off.
It was not the first time that Trump, known to get little sleep, had appeared less than fully awake during televised events.
Last year, he was also filmed apparently dozing off during a lengthy Cabinet meeting, once again while administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, were speaking.
Later, he told reporters: “Some people said, he closed his eyes. Look, it got pretty boring. I didn’t sleep. I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell outta here.”
Trump regularly made fun of Joe Biden’s cognitive capacity and spent most of the past few years referring to the then-president as “Sleepy Joe.”
But Trump was 78 years and 7 months when he was sworn into office last January, making him the oldest American president to take the oath.
Since then, he has suffered from swollen ankles and frequent hand bruises, regularly confuses names and dates, and his trademark long-winded tangents are becoming even longer, veering into bizarre segues on everything from wind farms and White House decor to first lady Melania Trump’s underwear.
However, the president and his doctors insist he is in “excellent” health.
He has also insisted that he doesn’t fall asleep in public, but simply shuts his eyes now and then.
“It’s very relaxing to me,” he told the Wall Street Journal last year.
“Sometimes they’ll take a picture of me blinking, blinking, and they’ll catch me with the blink.
